fulbright Taiwan online journal

fulbright Taiwan online journal

Author: Paul Vierthaler 李友仁

Paul Vierthaler 李友仁
Paul Vierthaler is a doctoral student in East Asian studies at Yale. His focus is the historical contexts of Ming and Qing fiction

Brief Thoughts on Living and Travelling in Taiwan

My wife and I moved to Taipei with a certain amount of trepidation. The benefits were clear: she could take time off work to learn Chinese and all the materials that I would need to finish my dissertation were available. Yet it was a nerve-wracking prospect to spend nearly a year away from our dog, whom my father-in-law is looking after, in a place where only one of us spoke the language and neither of us had been. Now, ten months later, it was proven to be one of the best choices we could have made. We had heard Taiwan was an easy place to live, but had not realized it would be easier than anywhere we had lived before. Between the friendliness of the people, the ease of transportation, the cost of living, and the abundant access to work materials, it has been more pleasant than we could have imagined. Most of my time this year has been spent working on my dissertation. The wide-ranging and easily accessible materials at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy at Academia Sinica allowed me to go from just two chapters to a full dissertation. The desk they provided and my extremely

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Late-Imperial Bibliographic Studies and Digital Quantitative Analysis

       Modern scholars of late-Imperial Chinese literature benefit from collected texts printed during the Ming and Qing dynasties that are supplemented with bibliographic information on both extant and non-extant books. Cataloging old texts was traditionally an important part of late-Imperial Chinese scholarship. Scholars closely researched important works by exploring their textual histories, identifying forgeries, and tracing their provenance. Some of this information was eventually preserved in large annotated indexes.        Publishing houses also printed compilations of popular texts and sometimes reprinted entire libraries. Though some were commercial products, other endeavors aimed to preserve (particularly those sponsored by the government). Many examples of this exist, the most famous being the 18th century The Complete Library of the Four Treasuries (Si ku quan shu 四庫全書), compiled under the Qianlong (乾隆) emperor.  This was accompanied by An Index of Summaries of the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries (Si ku quan shu zong mu ti yao 四庫全書總目提要), a bibliographic index that provided short descriptions of the titles within, as well as many that were not included in the Si ku quan shu.  This tendency to publish collections of older books was common and likely lead to the preservation of

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Research & Reflections

fulbright taiwan online journal